Riot Games is suing the Vietnamese mobile developer Imba Games. The cause of the conflict was the game I Am Hero: AFK Tactical Teamfight. According to Riot Games, she borrowed many details from her Teamfight Tactics autobattler — right down to the names and abilities of the characters.
Teamfight Tactics. Source: Riot Games
According to the Polygon portal, Riot Games filed a lawsuit in a California court last Thursday.
The company demanded that Imba Games remove the “fake” and pay compensation of $150,000 for each copyright infringement.
According to the lawsuit, there were a lot of such violations.
Riot Games found in I Am Hero: AFK Tactical Teamfight characters with almost the same names, appearance and abilities as the Teamfight Tactics characters. For example, the scientist Heimerdinger discovered a “double” named Dinger. Also, the heroes Vi and Timo received “clones” — their names are Vai and Tomi.
In addition, in some cases, Imba Games literally copied the description of the heroes from the laura League of Legends (Tactical Teamfight — a spin-off of this game).
Imba Games itself does not agree with the accusation of plagiarism. The Vietnamese studio has not publicly commented on the lawsuit, but it has previously discussed it with Riot Games.
Riot Games has sued before because of plagiarism. In 2017, she filed a lawsuit against the Chinese studio Moonton
. The company claimed that the titles Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA and Magic Rush: Heroes are too similar to League of Legends. The California court rejected the claim, but the court in China sided with Riot Games and ordered Moonton to pay compensation of $2.9 million.
Recall that at the beginning of the month it became known about another trial due to plagiarism in a mobile game. The Krafton company opposed the authors of Free Fire, accusing them of copying the PUBG Battle royale. She also sued Apple, Google and YouTube.